Elizabethan Baldrick
The Elizabethan Baldrick is the servant and bondsman, rather than a friend, to Lord Edmund Blackadder, who mistreats him, and, Baldrick claims, at first tried to kill him. He has a bedroom in Blackadder's house, but has also been forced to sleep in the gutter and on the roof. He has a tendency to eat dung. Baldrick has been in Lord Edmund's service longer than either of them care to remember. While his master treats him with utter contempt, he remains intensely loyal, showing a strong desire to please Blackadder. Biography This Baldrick, whilst perhaps not as dim as his descendants, is far more stupid than the original. A kindly soul, Baldrick's lack of formal education is compensated for by his basic streetwise cunning. While his "cunning plans" do sometimes have a strange, twisted and often perverse logic and cunning to them (one suggestion was that Blackadder repay his debts by making money as a male prostitute, another is to disguise a "mad, wild, killer bull" as a rooster and enter it in a cockfight), he does possess an entertaining level of stupidity. In one episode, Blackadder attempts to teach Baldrick how to add, asking if he had "two beans, and I add two more beans, what does that make?". Baldrick's conclusions ("Some beans", "Three beans... and that one", and "a very small casserole"), lead Blackadder to comment "To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to 'other people', wasn't it?" and that "The ape-creatures of the Indus have mastered this". He did, however, figure out the equation in the middle of a later conversation. It was also in this series that the first signs of Baldrick's love of turnips was shown, in the episode "Beer", where he and Percy famously discover a turnip shaped like a "thingy". Baldrick later describes the incident as "triffic". He is particularly delighted by the discovery, because it contrasts with his own "thingy" which is shaped like a turnip. In the same episode Baldrick reveals his recipe for "Turnip Surprise" - "the surprise is : there's nothing in it except the turnip". He is amazed when Blackadder points out that the Turnip Surprise is in fact simply a turnip. Baldrick once went on an "all mouse diet" by hanging a piece of cheese off of the end of his nose and lying with his mouth open, hoping that mice would scurry in. He later tried the same thing, with a mouse on the end of his nose to catch a cat, for variety. Baldrick was also bridesmaid at Lord Blackadder's abortive wedding. Queenie kept him as a pet, calling him Lassie (Baldrick did not complain) and he stuck two pencils up his nose, so that he could attend a Royal fancy dress party as a pencil case. It can be argued that the sole triumph of this Baldrick was noticing that the mangroves and flowing lava probably meant that Captain Redbeard Rum hadn't, after all, berthed his ship in Southampton; however, a counter-argument exists that he can also be acclaimed for actually being able to tell the difference between a head and a foot, unlike future Baldricks, such as the Georgian version. Category:Characters Category:Blackadder II characters Category:Blackadder's Christmas Carol characters Category:Baldrick family Category:Characters played by Tony Robinson Category:English Category:Male